Well it seems none of my predictions stuck. Ah well.
D/P remakes.... So it is likely the reason S/S ended up going in the direction it did was because they were working on these at the same time. If they do that and it turns out that these go the same way then they'll have divided their resources just to make two half-baked games and I will laugh. Legends: Arceus looks interesting though, looking forward to seeing more about it.
In the end it was competitive balance in VGC (or complete lack thereof) that kept me from S/S and the latter half of Gen 7. If the games are truly faithful to the originals (and the remakes are used for the next VGC season) then perhaps this will be the first game since BW2 to lack a gimmick mechanic, which I would welcome over the nonsense Dynamax has brought with it. I miss having Megas as part of the meta but not having them, Z-Moves or Dyna in the format would be refreshing.
As for the Pokedex, I wouldn't mind if they decide to leave out some of the roster as I would love if they specifically left out the past two generations of Pokemon. As it stands in VGC there isn't much reason to deviate from a team of something like Incineroar, Rillaboom, 1-3 DLC Legends (Urshifu, My Little Ponies, Galar Birds) and/or Ultra Beasts, another Terrain setter and/or your choice of support. It's honestly painful to see how ridiculous the power creep has been lately and the only other way this could be fixed would be if GF decided to restrict usages to the above Mons and some other offenders to 1-2 per team. It's not really the cookie cutter teams that bother me, it's that all the matches I've watched feel so bland and predictable on top of the braindead balance choices.